It’s Not In The PI, but it is in “The Scarecrow”

Former PI editor Gil Aegerter on the play, It’s Not In The PI, a response to my review:

Finally got a chance to see the play on the final day, and I must say I liked it — with reservations. I agree with Regina that if you weren’t on the inside, you might find it confusing and disjointed. But I thought it captured the quirky character of the P-I quite well (kind of like the Adcock review that’s quoted). And it works as metafiction — the play as newspaper story, reported and written well or poorly, depending on your viewpoint, whether you were skewered. I would like to see the play refined and leaned-out, because there are some fantastic moments. The reporter-politician exchanges were just perfect. The Green River segment was poignant. The comment by the victim’s mom who is grateful to the reporter for not describing her daughter by job or crime — it’s the same care that this play shows to the P-I.

The same care this play shows to the PI? Aegerter is fluent in quadratic equations, reads classical philosophy for fun and could front a band good enough to hit the road. As a theater critic, however, he comes up empty.

Note to Gil: You worked there for years. Did you inhabit your own experience?

If the PI resembled the paper dissected on stage, Aegerter wouldn’t have worked there for a day. Former PI reporter Tom Paulson, who advised the playwright team, told them not to turn reporters into heroes. There’s a lot of ground between hero and nonentity, and this play didn’t find it. Nothing on stage mattered. Yes, Gil, the reporter-politician exchanges were good, but they concerned some harried public official having an affair. Since this is the only moment that explores a reporter doing the real job, why was the theme chosen so trivial?

I’ll agree that the play (more or less) attempted to capture the paper’s quirky character but cut that quality free from its roots, the business of providing the public with news and opinion of consequence. Trivial stories appeared in the PI. Of course they did. Breath and depth gave way to quick and dirty. But every day there was something and usually several somethings I was proud of, something enterprising, hard won and well played.

The PI was unusual in one respect: Despite cutbacks, the addition of good
management at the top coupled with a tipping-point infusion of fine reporters woke the place up in its final years. I know they woke
me up. Thanks to them, we did not fade away but went down strong.

It’s Not In the The PI wasn’t written as an elegy for the PI. What its fact-based fiction tried and failed to be is an elegy for a newsroom. Not a single character interested me, save for the brief (and entirely accurate) appearance of theater critic Joe Adcock. If these characters were a newsroom, it would be one that deserved its demise. Its occupants are self-indulgent, dim-witted whiners. What could they write (draw, photograph, design or edit) that could possibly interest anyone?

The best elegy for newsroom culture arrived this year in the form of a thriller: Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow. The paper is the LA Times, which is diminished but not yet dead, despite the efforts of its owner to kill it. Connelly doesn’t get into that, wisely. He has a monster killer to deal with and doesn’t need Sam Zell, the monster Capitalist, cluttering up his copy.

The Scarecrow does not address why we’re losing breath and depth, just that we are, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “wandering between worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” In the meantime, there’s a great newsroom fallen on hard times. We meet the narrator, reporter Jack McEvoy, just after he’d been laid off.

Every eye in the newsroom followed me as I left Kramer’s office and walked back to my pod. The long looks made it a long walk. The pink slips always came out on Fridays and they all knew I had just gotten the word.

From a newsroom friend:

Holy fucking shit, you got pinked!…Man, this ain’t right.

The world ain’t right, Larry.

Like the paper itself, my time was over. It was all about the Internet now. It was about hourly uploads to online editions and blogs. It was about television tie-ins and Twitter updates…The morning paper might as well be called the Daily Afterthought. Everything in it was posted on the web the night before.

Editor and McEvoy exchange:

I just want to say we are really going to miss you around here, Jack.

I nodded my thanks.

I am sure Angela will pick up without a blip.

She’s
very good and she’s hungry, but she doesn’t have the chops. Not yet, at
least, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? The newspaper is supposed to
be the community’s watchdog and we’re turning it over to the puppies.
Think of all the great journalism we’ve seen in our lifetimes. The
corruption exposed, the public benefit. Where’s that going to come from
now with every paper in the country getting shredded? Our government?
No way. TV, the blogs? Forget it. My friend who took the buyout in
Florida says corruption will be the new growth industry without the
papers watching.

On showing up early to the paper:

The place was completely dead,
not a reporter or editor in sight, and I got a stark feeling for what
the future held. At one time the newsroom was the best place in the
world to work. A bustling place of camaraderie, competition, gossip,
cynical wit and humor, it was at the crossroads of ideas and debate. It
produced stories and pages that were vibrant and intelligent, that set
the agenda for what was discussed and considered important in a city
and diverse and exciting as Los Angeles. Now thousands of pages of
editorial content were being cut each year and soon the paper would be
like the newsroom, an intellectual ghost town. In many ways I was
relieved that I would not be around to see it.

Insider lingo:

I headed away from the raft and over to the elevator alcove.

Got dimes? Prendergast called after me.

I
waved a hand over my head without looking back. Prendergast always
called that out to me when I left the city room to chase a story. It
was a line from Chinatown. I didn’t use pay phones anymore – no reporter did – but the sentiment was clear. Stay in touch.

More lingo:

I then pointed at the story on  her computer screen, made a fist and banged it lightly on her desk.

Run that baby, I said.

It was a line from All the President’s Men, one of the greatest reporter stories every told, and I immediately realized she didn’t recognize it.

Insider
lingo in newsrooms is crucial. Even more lingo: On hearing he won’t be
able to write a story for the excellent reason that he’s a participant
in it, he says,

Déjà vu all over again.

She squinted her eyes at me like she was wondering if I realized the inanity of what I had just said.

It’s a saying. Yogi Berra? The baseball guy?

You don’t know Déjà vu all over again, got dimes?, the 30 list and Run that baby,
you aren’t part of the team. Connelly’s good enough to suggest his
reporter might have been coasting before the ax fell (no front-page
anchor story in 7 years), and that younger, hungrier replacements would
have their own culture to contribute if they got a chance, which they
won’t. There isn’t world enough and time in newspapers for them to find
their own breath and depth.

Life after:

I am
writing now. Every day. I usually find a crowded coffee shop in the
afternoon in which to set up my laptop. I have learned that I cannot
write in authorial silence. I must fight distraction and white noise. I
must come as close as possible to the experience of writing in a
crowded newsroom. I seem to need the din of background conversations,
ringing phones and keyboards clacking to feel comfortable and at home.
Of course, it is an artificial replacement for the real thing. There is
no camaraderie in a coffee shop. No sense of “us against the world.”
These are things I am sure I will miss about the newsroom forever.

For
those who want to soak in newsroom atmosphere but can’t take Connelly’s
brand of terror, there’s the goofy dark humor of Carl Hiaasen’s Basket Case from 2002. When I was at the PI, it was a must read.